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E SIGNIFICANCE OF 
SINCLAIR LEWIS 



BY 



STUART P. SHERMAN 




NEW YORK 
HARCOURT, BRACE and COMPANY 



Copyright, 1922, by 
Harcoiirt, Brace and Company, Inc. 



err. , 
©CI.Ar>83i74 




Photo by Nickolas Muray 



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NOVELS hy SINCLAIR LEWIS 

Our Mr. Wrenn 

The Trail of the Hawk 

The Job 

Free Air 

Main Street 

Babbitt 

Each, $2.00 



HARCOURT, BRACE and COMPANY 
1 WEST 47th ST.. NEW YORK 



THE SIGNIFICANCE of 
SINCLAIR LEWIS 

hy STUART P. SHERMAN 

As a leader in the famous revolt of the Younger Generation, 
Mr. Sinclair Lewis is distinguished from many of his coevals 
by the velocity of his intelligence and the justice of his antip- 
athies. Not quite incidentally, he is conspiring with the spirit 
of the times to become the most interesting and important 
novelist in America. Not, as is commonly supposed, a man of 
one book, he has marked his passage through the stage of 
brilliant promise by a succession of substantial accomplishments. 
Yet he is still so young and so brimming with energy, talents, 
and invention that he impresses one as a man from whom much 
is to be expected. With all his other gifts, he has that faculty 
for being opportune w^hich the envious ascribe to luck but which 
the knowing perceive is a hard-earned acquisition and a part 
of the open-eyed efficiency of genius. Mr. Lewis is opportune, 
because he industriously studies himself and his age, like a good 
humanist, till he understands the needs and aspirations and 
powers of both. The times in America since the War of the 
German Invasions have clamored for adequate representation 
in fiction; with vision of arresting centrality and sharpness, Mr. 
Lewis is giving it. The publication of his new novel Babbitt 
will set a thousand newspaper reviewers to discussing whether 
it equals the novel which fluttered their dove-cotes in 1920. 
It is my purpose rather to indicate the place which Babbitt 
occupies in the succession of Mr. Lewis's books, and to invite 
somewhat more serious attention to the quality of his work as 
d whole, and to his significance on the contemporar}^ scene. 

When Mark Twain, Henry James, and W. D. Howells 
died, the wide domain of American realism gaped for a mas- 
culine heir. There followed an interval in which no one 
would read an American who could get a British novel. The 
field swarmed with claimants who could not be taken seriously, 

[1] 



who were just ^'outside" literature. There was an occasional 
offering by an old hand, but the ''movement" halted for lack of 
adequate leadership. Poetry was said to be "looking up" — to 
Mr. Masters and to Miss Lowell, who from different direc- 
tions had given it fresh impetus. But in prose fiction there 
seemed to be, say ten years ago, no one "significant" to swear 
by or to swear at but Mr. Dreiser, a barbarian who has never 
learned to write English. In their desperation, the critical 
instigators of our "movement" urged us for a time to look up to 
Mr. Dreiser. Later they shifted their attention to a more 
scrupulous artist, Mr. Hergesheimer, who was veering uncer- 
tainly between realism and an exotic type of the historical- 
romantic, and to Mr. Cabell, who had achieved a succes de 
scandale in the erotic-fantastic. From the "lunatic fringe" of 
experimentation there was an ominous buzzing of "Freudians". 
Whatever was most unwholesome in the fiction of Russia, 
France, Germany, and the younger England was cried up by 
our criticasters and seized upon for imitation. As a fairly 
direct consequence of the critical encouragement given to bad 
English and mad psychology, we are now asked to admire such 
erotic rubbish as Mr, Waldo Frank's Rahab, in which a 
female finds amid the "sickly dissolutions" of the underworld, 
as Mr. Lewis Mumford tenderly phrases it, "like a rainbow 
glimmering over a pool of stagnant water, a justification and 
a light." As I trust even Mr. Menken would say, — "Bosh!" 
But in the fall of 1920 arrived, to deliver the beleaguered cita- 
del of our hope and sanity, Mr. Sinclair Lewis with Main 
Street. 

Now Main Street, a criticism of contemporary life with 
special reference to its interest and beauty, is important to us 
socially because, more thoroughly than any novel since Uncle 
Toins Cabin, it has shaken our complacency with regard to the 
average quality of our civilization. But it and the other work 
of Mr. Lewis which I shall discuss, are equally important to our 
literature as a return to the main matter and the manner of 
our national narrative. 

If we had applied ourselves more diligently to the search 
for a deliverer, we might have observed that Mr. Lewis was 

[2] 



coming, far back in 1914, when he published Our Mr. Wrenn 
— as the seductive title suggests, a merrily bubbling story with 
a "happy ending", somewhat in the vein of H. G. Wells's Kipps 
and Mr. Polly. Mr. Wrenn, age thirty-five, sales-entry clerk 
in the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company of New York, is 
described as "a meek little bachelor — a person of inconspicuous 
blue ready-made suits, and a small unsuccessful mustache." 
What makes this little clerk significant is a rudimentary 
poetic impulse. With a hunger for adventure stimulated by 
the moving-pictures, and the work of Mr. Kipling and Jack 
London, the hero gently revolts from the routine of office, 
visits England in a cattleboat, and finds romance incarnate 
in a red-haired art-student in a green crash smock, Istra Nash, 
who amuses herself with his guileless Philistinism ; but he re- 
turns in the end to a good domestic Nelly and the evening 
paper with seven cents' worth of potato salad from the deli- 
catessen shop. 

In this, his first picture of Main Street, Mr. Lewis utilizes 
a formula which is perhaps more or less familiar to students 
of the Saturday Evening Post. But already one can mark his 
possession of faculties which are to give new interest and 
seriousness to the ancient tale of the grocer's apprentice. Here 
is a mastery of the racy American vernacular unequalled since 
O. Henry flourished ; vivid and abundant observation ; the real- 
istic "discovery" of the cattle-ship. Here the Middle- Western 
Rotarian is introduced in a single synoptic sentence: — "an 
American who had a clipped mustache, brisk manners, a Knight- 
of-Pythias pin, and a mind for duck-shooting, hardware-selling, 
and cigars." Here is an imagination which explores with equal 
success the small mind of Mr. Wrenn superheated in a sales 
campaign, and the psychology of a frustrated art student from 
California, cursed with ambition without power. And here 
finally is a point of view, detached, critical, illumined by the 
coming spirit — a point of view from which the romantic hunger 
of Mr. Wrenn and his kind, and the artistic and intellec- 
tual aspirations of the girl with red-hair and her kind, can be 
treated with that "mixture of love and wit," which Thackeray 
declares is the essence of humor. Says Istra Nash to Mr. 

[3] 



Wrenn, speaking of the Bohemians: "Being Free, of course 
they're not allowed to go and play with nice people, for when 
a person is Free, you know, he is never free to be anything 
but Free". It is a sentence indicative of that early maturing of 
the critical faculty which distinguishes the first novel of Mr. 
Lewis from, let us say, the first novel of Mr. Floyd Dell. 

His second book, The Trail of the Hawkj 1915, is dedi- 
cated to ''the optimistic rebels, (including his present publisher) 
through whose talk at luncheon the author watches the many- 
colored spectacle of life". It is on the surface a story about one 
of the earlier successful American aviators ; but I find, under this 
curious disguise, the nearest approach that Mr. Lewis has yet 
made to an "autobiographical" novel, to a revelation of the 
motives and the influences which have shaped his own career. 
The imaginative progeny of the realist is of course usually 
related in some fashion to the seven wrestlers who struggle 
within himself. The animating passion even of little Mr. 
Wrenn — his quest for romance in love and travel — Mr. Lewis 
doubtless found duplicated in his own heart; but in the case 
of Mr. Wrenn, he diluted the passion and gently caricatured its 
embodiment. In The Trail of the Hawk he treats the same 
quest but he treats it seriously, and he endows his hero with 
an important additional passion — the desire for distinction, the 
love of glory. Carl Ericson of Joralemon, Minnesota, a second- 
generation Norwegian, is described as "heir-apparent of the 
age", the typical American of his period : "It was for him to 
carry on the American destiny of extending the Western hori- 
zon ; his to restore the wintry Pilgrim virtues and the exuberant, 
October, partridge-drumming days of Daniel Boone; then to 
add, in his own or another generation, new American aspirations 
for beauty." 

There is our theme: — the emergence of a typical American 
from our Middle-Western frontier in the generation who were 
small boys in 1890. The stages are interesting. First, there is 
a healthy athletic boyhood in an American small town, where a 
spark is dropped by a village radical who has read Robert 
Ingersoll, Karl Marx, and Napoleon — a preliminary sketch of 

[4] 



Bjornstam in Main Street. "Life", says this rural philosopher 
to the boy, "is just a little old checker game played by the alfalfa 
contingent at the country store unless you've got an ambition 
that's too big to ever quite lasso it. You want to know that 
there's something ahead that's bigger and more beautiful than 
anything you've ever seen". Next comes a course in Plato 
College, a course terminated abruptly by the boy's open cham- 
pionship of an instructor from Yale who has ruined his use- 
fulness to the institution by discussing the works of H. G. 
Wells and G. B. Shaw and by admitting the existence of the 
theory of evolution. There follows a period of miscellaneous 
adventure as chauffeur, travelling actor, porter on the Bowery, 
mechanic in the Canal Zone and Mexico, then an apprentice- 
ship in a school of aviation in California, flying for country 
fairs, a series of prize flights followed by intoxicating ovations, 
the development of the Touricar company, a love affair on the 
Palisades and in the Berkshires, respectability and entrance 
upon contemporai^^ civilization, such as it is, including modern 
plumbing, individual bed-rooms, candles on the dinner table, 
Sunday morning breakfasts with choice of conversation or auc- 
tion-bridge, and the reading of Tono-Bungay, David Copper- 
field, Jude the Obscure, The Damnation of Theron Ware, 
Mada?ne Bovary, McTeague, Walden, War and Peace, Tur- 
genev, Balzac, and William James. In a free poetic fashion, I 
assume that this narrative sketches Mr. Lewis's own flight from 
Sauk Centre, Minnesota, by way of Yale College, New York, 
and San Francisco journalism, and the short story magazine, 
into literature. 

The Trail of the Hawk is a book with extravagant va- 
riety of scenes and atmospheres, the first two-thirds of it writ- 
ten with much gusto. It is important for our study of Mr. 
Lewis's development as exhibiting the intellectual stuffiness of 
the stagnating middle-western town, which was the point of 
departure for his own "revolt". It is still more important as 
disclosing plainly some of the things which his taste and in- 
telligence recognize as beautiful and desirable. Mr. Lewis is 
a good hater, but, contrary to the common rumor, he is not all 

[5] 



compact of antipathies. He has, I am convinced, a generalized 
conception of the Good, which, if he were a lyric poet, he 
could capture in a net of images, like Shelley addressing the 
Skylark. He likes free air, the swoop of the hawk, arrows that 
go straight to the mark. Everything that is candid, crisp, fresh, 
alert, clean, supple, active, and darting, he likes. He has felt 
the allurement of ''beauty with a touch of strangeness" ; but he 
instinctively revolts when beauty is touched with morbidity. 
From Kipling perhaps he acquired an inclination for purpose- 
ful young men who keep themselves fit and are capable of 
bridging the Ganges, and for young women to match, with 
temperament controlled by intelligence — of the Beatrice type. 
Of Istra Nash, who reappears in The Trail of the Hawkj 
he remarks significantly: ''She always wants new sensations 
yet doesn't want to work, and the combination isn't very good." 
Carl Ericson, the flyer, relishes his adventures, and Mr. Lewis 
reports them with such sense of flight and clouds and the upper 
air as I have felt nowhere else save in Mr. Norman Hall's 
High Adventure. But this enterprising young man is notably 
hard-headed, a hard-worker, with a good workman's prejudice 
in favor of keeping himself and his tools in order. Mr. Lewis's 
beauty is always tonic — never relaxing. I remember hearing 
him say, with a grimace, that he liked best in Main Street the 
purple patches over which he had sweat blood, but that no one 
else noticed them. His use of landscape is rigorously econom- 
ical, but there are paragraphs, even in this earlier book, done 
with a touch that recalls Tolstoy and Turgenev in their great 
hunting scenes. Here is a whiff of the hero's boyhood in 
Minnesota: 

He loitered outside the shed, sniffing a\ the smoke from burning 
leaves — the scent of autumn and migration and wanderlust. Hf 
glanced down between houses to the reedy shore of Joralemon 
Lake. The surface of the water was smooth, and tinted like a blue- 
bell, save for one patch in the current where wavelets leaped with 
October madness in sparkles of diamond fire. Across the lake, woods 
sprinkled with gold-dust and paprika broke the sweep of sparse yellow 
stubble, and a red barn was softly brilliant in the caressing sunlight 
and lively air of the Minnesota prairie. Over there was the field of 

[6] 



valor, where grown-up men with shiny shotguns went hunting prairie 
chickens; the Great World, leading clear to the Red River Valley and 
Canada. 

Three mallard ducks, with necks far out and wings beating hur- 
riedly, shot over Carl's head. From far off a gun-shot floated echoing 
through forest hollows; in the waiting stillness sounded a rooster's 
crow, distant, magical. 

If Mr. Lewis could "abandon his mind" for a season to 
landscape and the joy of our American seas and mountains, he 
could give us our most exhilarating tale of country life. He 
has the eye and the zest. But as yet he is so jealous of his 
purely human interest that he is capable of cramming all Cali- 
fornia into a parenthesis. 

There is good writing, there are humor and invention, there 
are various milieus effectively rendered in Mr. Lewis's first two 
novels; but in his third, The Job, presented in 1917, there are 
three to four admirable pieces of characterization and a sobriety 
and firmness of composition which entitle this book to a place 
next to Main Street and Babbitt. As he swooped to meet the 
airmen in 1915, so he swoops, in 1917, to meet the new woman 
making a career in business. Una Golden of Panama, Pennsyl- 
vania, graduate of a business college, who becomes a stenogra- 
pher in New York, works into suburban real-estate, and then 
into the assistant-managership of a line of hotels, is, you may 
say, a typical heroine of the ''success" magazines. Agreed : — 
in a sense, so she is, just as Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger is 
their hero. The editors of the "success" magazines guiltily 
share with novelists like Mr. Bennett and Mr. Lewis a sense 
for recognizing the significant types of our changing civilization. 
Una Golden differs, however, from the smart short-story writer's 
girl-with-the-powder-puff as, to take a familiar illustration, 
Lear's daughters differ from their sketches in Holinshed. She 
has been seriously and minutely considered. She has been sym- 
pathetically and intelligently studied. She has been under- 
stood in her pathetic relations to her mother; in her variously 
irritating relations to a series of employers ; in relation to the 
humdrum suitor that she leaves in Panama, the brilliant young 
cub who leaves her, the fat-necked voluble commercial traveller 
whom she marries; in relation, finally, to the intimate inner 

[7] 



conflict between her sexual and emotional instincts and her 
desire to respect herself and to ''amount to something". The 
thing is, as Henry James used to say, "done", and with great 
precision of stroke. Una Golden lives, and her futile mother. 
The erratic and "dynamic" young cub, Walter Babson, lives. 
Eddie Schwirtz, the commercial traveler, a gorgeous beast, 
lives. And they and dozens of subordinate characters move 
without confusion through dozens of offices, apartments, board- 
ing-houses, and streets, each eruditely saturated with the ap- 
propriate elements of its own atmosphere. 

Not an interesting group, till Mr. Lewis became vividly 
interested in it. What value does he see in Una Golden ? What 
beauty? Well, he sees her as an intelligent and purposeful 
feminine will emerging from the respectable helplessness and 
hopelessness of girls who married their first chance and "settled 
down" in Panama, Pennsylvania — emerging into the beauty 
of a self-directed life. He sees her as a girl with youth's 
hunger for enchantment, with arms outstretched for it, missing 
it, but closing resolutely upon what the wisest among the 
children of men generally accept as the second best. From the 
lights of Main Street in Panama, also from certain city liglits 
here flashed upon her, this adventurer derives her "value". 

There were a score of mild matter-of-fact Unas on the same Ele- 
vated train with her, in their black hats and black jackets and black 
skirts and white waists, with one hint of coquetry in a white-lace 
jabot or a white-lace veil; faces slightly sallow or channeled with 
care, but eyes that longed to flare with love ; women whom life didn't 
want except to type its letters about invoices of rubber heels; women 
who would have given their salvation for the chance to sacrifice them- 
selves for love . . . And there was one man on that Elevated 
train, a well-bathed man with cynical eyes, who read a little book 
with a florid gold cover, all about Clytemnestra, because he was cer- 
tain that modern cities have no fine romance, no high tragedy; that 
you must go back to the Greeks for real feeling. He often aphorized, 
"Frightfully hackneyed to say, 'woman's place is the home,' but real- 
ly, you know, these women going to offices, vulgarizing all their fine 
womanliness, and their shrieking sisterhood going in for suffrage and 
Lord knows what. Give me the reticenses of the harem rather than 

[8] 



one of these office-women with gum-chewing vacuities. None of them 
clever enough to be tragic." 

Readers who turn to fiction for "heavenly rest" are not a 
little disturbed by the presence in all Mr. Lewis's books of cer- 
tain signs of what is called '^social unrest" or, with more overtly 
hostile intention, "socialistic feeling". Of Una Golden, for 
example, we are told that, "Into her workaday mind came a 
low light from the fire which was kindling the world ; the 
dual belief that life is too sacred to be taken in war and 
filthy industries and dull education ; and that most forms and 
organization and inherited castes are not sacred at all". Now, 
to the intelligent mind there is really nothing less perturbing 
than the emergence, in classes and individuals, of intelligence 
and taste, bespeaking themselves, in an imperfectly adjusted 
world, to seek their own level. That kind of unrest does not 
destroy, it creates, the "divine order". The unrest of girls like 
Una Golden is the hope of the middle-class ; and the middle- 
class, Mr. John Corbin has just assured us, is the hope of our 
society. From the time of the Rape of the Sabines to the 
time of Samuel Clemens there has been a danger in unsettled 
societies that social bandits would dash in from the border and 
carry off the carefully nurtured daughters of "first families". 
That danger is the spice of life in a democracy, which offers no 
more kindling incentive to its undiscovered talents than ad- 
mission, after due ordeals and the probation of a generation or 
two, into its first families. I for one regret to observe that 
our ancient custom of assuring every schoolboy of his right to 
hope for the Presidency is falling into desuetude — without the 
slightest visible reason w^hy it should. A novelist who inspires 
the Younger Generation by reviving this and kindred concep- 
tions of democratic opportunity and reward is restoring one 
of our invaluable traditions. 

I make this solemn transition to Free Air, 1919, because it 
is a "light" novel, constituting a humorous interlude in Air. 
Lewis's realistic march. Gravely captious critics may be dis- 
posed to dismiss it as a pot-boiler, prepared for the fancy of our 

[9] 



touring automobilists. We have frankly admitted that Mr. 
Lewis is opportune. I do not see how anyone who has ever 
cranked a Ford can resist this crisp tale of the girl from Brook- 
lyn in her Gomez-Dep roadster and the ingenious young me- 
chanic in his "bug" from Schoenstrom, Minnesota, who dis- 
cover each other's attraction in an exciting drive by way of 
Gopher Prairie and the Yellowstone to Seattle, with an en- 
gineering education and a Sabine Marriage just ahead. The 
plot is, indeed, anybody's ; but the execution is that of a masterly 
realist on a lark — not raising any question about the main con- 
ventions and conditions of his modern fairy-tale but playing 
the game with such zest that one almost forgets to enquire 
whether a nice girl from Brooklyn ever could so far forget 
herself on a summer vacation as to find anything in common 
with a garage man. Love as a specialized passion is, as Mr. 
Lewis treats it in his most serious vein, but a welcome addi- 
tional zest to companionship in the adventure of life. Here 
it is but a fillip to the intensely serious consideration of extri- 
cating a car from a ''morass of prairie gumbo" or piloting it 
in safety up the last pitch of the continental divide. If in the 
end Milt Daggett has learned something about the care of 
his nails from his association with Claire Boltwood, and she 
something about shifting gears from him; the affair, like the 
Beggar s Opera, is carried off with too light an air to affect 
subversively the foundations of society. 

Main Street, 1920, is another story. Mr. Lewis had been 
incubating it for six or seven years, though I suspect that his 
critical faculties were edged for its final revision by his com- 
parative study of American small towns, made on that excur- 
sion over the Lincoln Highway, which he so gaily chronicled 
in Free Air. A second novel as deeply rooted in his native 
soil and in his own past would be, as difficult a feat for him as, 
for their respective authors, a second Huckleberry Finn, a 
second David Copperfield, a second Mill on the Floss, a. sec- 
ond Pendennis, a second Clayhanger. Like these other five 
great novels, Alain Street appears to be the harvest of the 
writer's best land, which is so often his native heath and the 

[10] 



V 

\ 



deep impressions of early life, ineffaceable by the lapse of years, 
and poignantly touching the heart through the revisiting eyes 
of age. In its exhibition of the interwoven lives of the com- 
munity, it has the authority, the intimacy, the many-sided in- 
sights, the deep saturation of color, which no journalist can 
ever "get up", which are possible only, one is tempted to say, 
to one who packs into his book the most vital experience and 
observation of a lifetime. One must have lived that stuff* in 
order to have reproduced it as living organism. And it is 
with some vague sense that a man can contain only one great 
autobiography that many readers of Main Street have prophe- 
sied against Mr. Lewis's future. 

To those who wish to believe that they have found not 
merely a new novel but also a new novelist, capable of fresh 
flights for distance and altitude, certain reassuring considera- 
tions may be presented. Main Street, unlike three-fourths of 
the novels of the day, is not autobiographical. It is to an ex- 
traordinary degree an objective representation of contempo- 
rary society extended through a period of not more than half- 
a-dozen years. In this society Mr. Lewis himself has not a 
single "personal representative." Neither Dr. Kennicot, nor 
Carol, nor Guy Pollock, nor Vida Sherwin, nor Sam Clark, 
nor Percy Breshnahan, nor Erik Valborg, nor Miles Bjorn- 
stam, nor Fern MuUins, nor Mrs. Bogart is his "register". 
Each one of these persons is a perfectly distinct individual with 
firm centre and contours honestly constructed after innumer- 
able observations and hard, earnest work of the realistic im- 
agination. Mr. Lewis wmU not exhaust his material while he 
retains his present capacity for research. Deeply indebted as 
he may be to Mr. Wells for the illumination of his point of 
view as an obserser of the human spectacle, he has studied the 
art of constructing the novel under other masters with far 
greater respect for their profession than that famous producer 
who semi-annually charges a new lay figure with the task of 
communicating to the world the latest state of his own con- 
sciousness. The contemporary English novelist whose best 
work is most nearly comparable with Alain Street is Mr. Ben- 

[11] 



nett in The Old Wives' Tale and Clayhanger. But the book 
from which, I should say, Mr. Lewis without losing a par- 
ticle of his own idiom or the independence of his American 
vision, has learned his most valuable "secrets" is Madame 
B ovary. 

Both Main Street and Madame Bovary are mordantly 
critical representations of contemporary civilization. In each 
case, the criticism is intensely focussed upon the bourgeois so- 
ciety of a representative provincial town. In each case, the 
"hero" is a country doctor, who is, thanks to an insensitive 
aesthetic organization, sufficiently content with his lot and in 
love with his young wife. In each case, the "heroine" has been 
touched by literature and contact with the city to revolt against 
the Philistinism of her husband and the restrictions of her life, 
in behalf of romantic ideals of which she is unable to find any 
worthy incarnations. In each case, the searching criticism which 
plays over the scene and the actors is delivered indirectly by 
an intricate system of contrasts and the cross-lighting and re- 
flected lighting of subordinate characters. I will add an 
observation which many readers fail to make : Flaubert \^as. in 
love with Emma and Mr. Lewis is in love with Carol; and 
both authors analyze and expose the object of their affection 
with a merciless rigor which no woman can either understand 
or pardon — she can understand the rigor but not the love which 
inflicts it and survives it. They treat their heroes with similar 
austerity — with the difference that Flaubert despises his, and 
the American author does not. To the student of Mr. Lewis's 
indirect analytical method, I commend his remorseless twenty- 
fourth chapter, beginning with the "thesis": "All that mid- 
summer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicot" ; likewise his 
subtle record of Carol's reaction to Breshnahan in relation to 
her husband. So much for the parallelism between the French 
master and the American disciple. 

As for the divergence, it is not all to the advantage of 
Flaubert. Mr. Lewis saw more types of people, more kinds of 
activity, more meshes of the social network in Gopher Prairie 
than Flaubert saw in Rouen. Without destroying their artistic 

[12] 



subordination, he made more of his secondary personages. He 
increased greatly the significance and the tension of his novel 
by choosing, as the principal representatives of middle-class re- 
volt and middle-class stability, characters w^ith a far higher 
degree of general and professional intelligence than is pos- 
sessed by the French protagonists. He faithfully presents the 
specific erotic passion as only occasionally or seasonally per- 
turbing the average American temperament — not obsessing it, 
not hounding it. Flaubert sees this passion as the centre of 
his theme. Mr. Lewis does not. If our novelists generally 
were not dissuaded by the terrors of our censorship, if they dared 
to tell the truth, would they like many of their European col- 
leagues and like one or two of their American confreres, would 
they represent the average middle-class American as living fever- 
ishly from one liaison to the next? Mr. Lewis does not 
appear to think so. Dr. Kennicot had, before his marriage, been 
around "with the boys" and perhaps he never became utterly 
incapable of a slip; but I doubt whether Mr. Lewis has been 
guilty of any important suppression of the truth in declaring 
that his mind was absorbed in his five hobbies: medicine, land- 
investment, Carol, motoring, and hunting. As for Carol — that 
well-turned, dynamic, rather intensely feminine, too taut a 
young woman whom I meet with greater frequency each year, 
flinging her coat into chairs and "exploding" into other living 
rooms than those of Gopher Prairie, to the disgust of the stodgy 
and to the delight and the refreshment of the others — ; she 
might be more simply happy or more simply miserable if the 
sex instincts were stronger in her; if she could content herself 
with being either mother, wife or mistress; if she could repeat 
ex animo that sweet and wistfully cadenced Mid- Victorian line 
which, alas, I have forgotten, to the effect that love is only an 
incident in a man's life — " 'tis a woman's whole existence" — 
something like that. 

When I found that I had forgotten the exact words of 
this phrase, which in my youth I have heard a hundred times 
on plaintive lips, I went to some friends one generation older 
than mine, and confidently asked them to recall it. I wanted 

[13]. 



it, as you see, to conclude the preceding paragraph. But they 
too, had forgotten it, or they remember it, rather, as I re- 
member it — as something that people used to repeat, or as some- 
thing that Robert Browning might have excogitated in medi- 
tating on the early life of that eminent early Victorian, the 
authoress of Aurora Leigh. The oblivion vt^hich is overtaking 
this "familiar quotation" is a straw indicating a shifting of the 
winds of social change. The words no longer give an echo to 
the seat where modern love is throned. Opportunities for 
women opened by the war, the steady stimulation of middle- 
class daughters by the state universities, and various other 
causes are making the situation of intelligent girls marooned 
in our innumerable Gopher Prairies appear to them acutely 
painful and almost intolerable. The clear-eyed and hard- 
headed ones see in time, and the others too late for easy solu- 
tion of their problems, that a girl who lets love become her 
"whole existence" is snared, excluded from the special interests 
and activities of her age, and in a fair way to become tedious 
to her husband and to herself. In this new middle-class society 
which is forming around them, the clear-eyed and hard-headed 
ones perceive that abstract "womanhood" is destined to receive 
less lip-service and specific women more attention than they 
have received in the past. The woman who counts, like the 
man who counts, will be esteemed more and more for the 
developed virtues of her own individuality, whatever they may 
be, and less and less frequently conceived of as a "skirt", 
whatever its quality. Now so far as Main Street is "the story 
of Carol Kennicot", it shows an eager young creature beating 
her luminous wings rather wildly, as young creatures do, yet 
not without some sense of the direction in which light and 
freedom are. A "back-yard" affair with Erik Valborg — that 
for example, she discovers decisively, is not the way out. That 
might be an alleviant to the yearnings of Emma Bovary but it 
would not be even a temporary sop to her. With true in- 
sight into the significant aspect of the present unrest among 



young women, the revolt of Carol is shown to have very little 
relation with the much-advertised movement for "sexual free- 
dom". Carol is, on the contrary, rebellious precisely at the 
fetters which accepting such things of sex as a "woman's whole 
existence" has imposed upon her. Her revolt is inspired by a 
general hunger of the heart for its own development through 
appropriate activities of hand and will and brain. In so far 
as this is true, I judge her revolt to be not only significant but 
beautiful and not altogether hopeless, as I should attempt to 
show if I had space to discuss the "improvable greatness" of 
Mr. Kennicot and to prognosticate his wife's ultimate discovery 
of it and their transmission of their complementary virtues to 
their offspring. 

But that, adequately done, would demand another novel, 
dealing with the Kennicots of the second generation, which I 
hope Mr. Lewis will write when that generation has revealed 
itself to him. 

At present, however, while his satirical powers at their 
height, the young people who are just emerging from college 
may be congratulated that his devastating searchlight is still 
playing upon the middle-aged. His new novel Babbitt is not 
a sequel to Main Street but a parallel and coordinate extension. 
It is a picture of contemporary American society not in the 
small towns and villages but in the cities of some numerical 
pretentions. Zenith, the prosperous middle-western city of 
350,000, in which George F. Babbitt, the prosperous "realtor" 
establishes himself on Floral Heights, is inhabited largely by 
people who had in their youth ambition enough to get up and 
get out of the "hick burgs". They flatter themselves that, 
leaving behind them all the elements that constituted the dingi- 
ness and dreariness of Gopher Prairie, they have pressed for- 
ward to the mark of the high calling of hustling, right-thinking, 
forward-looking boosters, good-fellows, and 100% Americans. 
For Iron they have substituted copper sinks in the kitchen ; for 
the Saturday night tubbing, the daily bath ; for golden-oak, 
near-mahogany; for the Ford the limousine; for the dirty, 
ramshackle, huddle of shops and visibly suspendered tobacco- 

[15] 



chewing shopkeepers blocks of aspiring office buildings and 
hotels with manicure girls attending in the Pompeian Barber 
Shop; for the somnolent barn-like church an up-to-date com- 
petitive "community centre" with press-agents, military organi- 
zation, and pep-masters ; for cigars and poker in the parlor with 
Sam Clark and "the boys" monogrammed cigarettes and mixed 
auction bridge at the country club; for "open meetings" of the 
Thanatopsis society week-end parties with prohibition anecdotes 
and cocktails. 

With comprehensive and mordant notation of detail coupled 
with a formidable power of generalization, Mr. Lewis shows 
how the city attempts to solve the problem of the small town. 
Between Gopher Prairie and Zenith, there is the material pro- 
gress of a generation — a long march in America. But be- 
tween Gopher Prairie and Zenith, civilization, according to 
this record, — civilization, judged by the decisive tests — has not 
advanced an inch. The quantity of human happiness has not 
increased, nor has its quality improved. The people are not 
more open-minded, nor more upright, nor more beautiful, nor 
more interesting. This is not "the story of Carol", and the 
unrest among young women, which she so vividly illustrated, 
finds here no adequate representative. The "leading lady" does 
not lead. Myra Babbitt, Mrs. George F., is a woman, "defi- 
nitely mature", who has, in a dull fashion, accepted her uni- 
verse: "She was a good woman, a kind woman, a diligent 
woman, but no one, save perhaps Tinka her ten-year old, was 
at all interested in her or entirely aware that she was alive" — 
a tragical sentence, applicable enough to the average middle- 
class American woman of forty. But this is primarily a story 
of a man's unrest. This is the story of Babbitt; the graduate 
of a state university, the "swaddled American husband", the 
prosperous American broker, the Rotarian, the leading citizen, 
the consequence and cause of civilization as it exists in Zenith, 
and the embodiment of nearly all its vices and its virtues. 

Babbitt is a more important character than Dr. Kennicot 
in that he is more nearly ubiquitous. Less trustworthy as a 
man, he will perhaps be found more interesting as a "hero" 

[16] 



because he has less of character and more of temperament. 
Unlike the Doctor, he is highly self-conscious, he has a "soft" 
streak, he is an egotist, and he is eager for the applause and 
admiration of men and women, not excluding his wife, for 
whom he feels an habitual tolerance, and including his stenog- 
rapher, whom he wishes to impress as a "great man", and his 
manicurist, to whom he is willing, in relaxed and erratic moods, 
to appear as a person with possibilities of romance. In the 
morning Mr. Babbitt wears a well-made, well-pressed grey suit 
with white piping on the V of the vest. In the evening he 
wears, when there is important company, a "Tuxedo" which 
Mrs. Babbitt vainly insists that he should call a "dinner- 
jacket" — that is the precise "note" of their social status. He 
is diligent in business and not more crooked than William 
Washington Eathorne, President of the First State Bank, a 
chilly old gentleman who lives in an old brick house of the Civil 
War period, and who impresses Babbitt as "the real thing" by 
quietly ringing for a whiskey toddy, instead of mooing and 
baying around the subject, as in his own circle is the custom 
when the host produces something illicit from the ice-box. 

This is one of the many incidents by which Mr. Lewis 
illustrates the peculiar pathos of his hero's situation. With all 
that the civilization of Zenith can offer at his disposal, Babbitt 
is restless and unsatisfied. He has money enough, things enough, 
physical comforts enough. He has, like great numbers of our 
prosperous middle-class, reached the point where the multiplica- 
tion of things gives no addition of content. There is a gnaw- 
ing hunger in him but he can think of nothing that he wants 
to eat. In a vague way he desires "the right thing" for himself, 
for his family, for his community; but there is no authoritative 
standard, there is no one to tell him, there is nothing in the 
society of Zenith to show^ him by example, what the "real right 
thing" is. Consequently, in the restlessness of satiety and 
inner boredom, Babbitt unintelligently and unimaginatively 
gropes for his missing felicity in unfruitful directions: in imi- 
tating Mr. Eathorne, in speechmaking and prominence at busi- 
ness men's conventions, in running off to the Maine woods 

[17] 



where one can wear old clothes and chew tobacco and "cuss" 
In freedom, and finally in various experiments in marital in- 
fidelity. But from all these ventures he returns with the taste 
of sand and ashes in his mouth. And the only gleam that 
lights the final pages of the book is his indulgent humor towards 
his children, one of whom is studying the drama and labor 
statistics, while the other, his son, has just revealed his secret 
off-hand marriage. To the boy he says: 

"Practically I've never done a single thing I've wanted to in my 
whole life. I don't know's I've accomplished anything except just get 
along. . . . Well, maybe you'll carry things on further. I don't 
know. But I do get a kind of sneaking pleasure out of the fact that 
you knew what you wanted to do and did it. Well, those folks in 
there will try to bully you, and tame you down. Tell 'em to go to the 
devil! I'll back you. Take your factory job, if you want to. Don't 
be scared of the family. No, nor all of Zenith. Nor of yourself, the 
way I've been. Go ahead, old man! The world is yours!" 

I have no high expectation regarding Babbitt's son. He 
gives as little promise as his father of capacity for finding de- 
light in the things of the mind. The daughter may conceivably 
become an interesting individual, perhaps only an intense and 
difficult one. 

Babbitt is not a representation of the highest American 
standards of morals and manners. But neither is The Rise of 
Silas Lapha?n nor Huckleberry Finn nor Henry James's The 
American. Neither is Vanity Fair a representation of the high- 
est standards of morals and manners in England, nor is David 
Copperfield, nor Pride and Prejudice. \lt is not the business of 
the realistic novelist nor dramatist, to confine his studies to 
those small and isolated spots in which the society of his con- 
temporaries approaches perfection. To propose such an aim is 
absurd. A jury of award which accepted it would at once be 
obliged to exclude from its consideration practically everything 
that is worth considering. In the age of Elizabeth the accept- 
ance of such an aim would have excluded from consideration 
the chief tragedies of Shakespeare and all the comedies of Ben 
Jonson. The most important business of the capable painter of 

[18] 



contemporary society from Balzac to the present day has been 
the portrayal of the great representative types. In an immense 
and motley democracy booming furiously through the stages 
of material progress, few of the great representative types know 
anything about the "highest standard of manners and morals in 
America". 

All that we may fairly demand of our novelists — and it is 
a large demand — is that they themselves, as observers of the 
human spectacle, should be aware of this "highest standard", 
should paint their great representative types at a point of view 
at which the best society is at least within their vision. It is a 
large demand but it is a fair demand to make of a class of men 
who undertake to govern us through our imaginations. It is 
a fair demand to make of men whose profession involves a 
connoisseurship of truth and beauty. It is a necessary demand, 
if their criticism of life is to have any social value. Vanity Fair, 
for example, though it is for the most part a picture of a 
selfish and disagreeable world, is obviously written by a man 
who understands what an unselfish and agreeable world might 
be, while Mr. Dreiser's Genius, for another example, is a pic- 
ture of a selfish and disagreeable w^orld, written by a man in- 
capable of conceiving anything" else. 

Now Mr. Lewis, with increasing clearness of apprehension 
and vitality of presentment has devoted himself to the portraj^al 
of the representative. There is no denying the vigor or the 
representativeness of the types presented in The Job, Main 
Street, and Babbitt. Nor is there doubt in anyone's mind that 
Mr. Lewis's contemporary scene is drenched in irony and 
raked with satire. The one rather serious objection which one 
hears raised against his work is that the standards, the existence 
of which are implied in any consistently satiric picture of 
society, — the standards by which Mr. Lewis judges, for instance, 
Gopher Prairie and Zenith are not sufficiently in evidence. 
The publication of Babbitt is likely to increase the frequency 
of that objection ; for while in Alain Street, there are at least 
four persons, including Carol, w^ith quite definite conceptions 

[19] 



of what ought to be done to increase beauty and interest in 
Gopher Prairie, in Babbitt these quite definite improvements 
have been made, without essential increase of beauty or interest 
in the lives of the citizens; and no one in the book seems to 
understand what to do next. We are on the brink of a Tol- 
stoian problem. The artistic charm and vivacity of this novel, 
to say nothing of its social stimulation, would have been height- 
ened by somewhat freer employment of those devices of dra- 
matic contrast of which Mr. Lewis is a master — by the intro- 
duction of some character or group capable of reflecting upon 
the Babbitts oblique rays from a social and personal felicity, 
more genuine, more inward than any of the summoned wit- 
nesses possesses. Eventually, if Mr. Lewis does not wish to pass 
for a hardened pessimist, he will have to produce a hero qualified 
to register in some fashion the results of his own quest for the 
desirable; he will have to give us his Portrait of a Lady, his 
Pendennis, his Warrington and his Colonel Newcome. Mean- 
while I am very well content to applaud the valor of his pro- 
gress through Vanity Fair. 



[20] 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESf., 




015_939 798 1 



